6.2 Hellfire Citadel - Mythic Black Gate

This page is to be a brief summary on the final wing of mythic boss fights of Hellfire Citadel, written from the perspective of a hunter. The purpose of this is to act as a documented archive of our kills and to potentially aid any others currently working on the boss who're looking for resources and happen to come across the page.

Final boss is ARCHIMONDE

First kill was September 17, 2015 - world 96, US 18

The final boss! And a fairly decent final boss as far as they go. There are a few ways to handle this fight too, and even two ways to handle the way you'll see in the video below. One requires the damage to push phase 1 faster, and the other requires holding DPS to control when events happen. When we killed Archimonde we still didn't have very strong rings, and there definitely wasn't any ilevel upgrades, so we waited and controlled our pushes. You may need to do this too, or you may be struggling because you have the damage to push the phase.

The main difference is whether you push Archimonde past 85% before or after the desecrate. If you are waiting, then you want to get the Shadowfel Burst before you push him to 85% and get the desecrate. If you are not waiting, you push through 85% and the desecrate without the Shadowfel. The second is much harder if you don't have the damage.

Phase 1's challenge comes in the form of the Doomfire. You may even wish to save cooldowns for the second and third Doomfire. One doomfire will always drop at least 10 stacks, but ideally all three drop 10 stacks instead of 15. Once you're hitting 13, 14, 15 the fight becomes quite a bit more difficult for healers.
edit; just to be clear here, the 'one doomfire strat' involves burning through 85% without the shadowfel mentioned above - sometimes you will fail and get two doomfires. It's not necessarily an easier strategy, it's just a faster one, and amounts to more DPS for damage classes. It is an easier farm strategy, not learning strategy. If you are trying to do this strategy while learning because you think your group has the dps, be well prepared for phase 2.

Again, just about anyone can handle the doomfire fire stacks, but most raids will have mages, hunters, tanks and/or disc priests picking it up. As a hunter, your deterrence will reduce the damage taken while holding stacks and disengage can make it easier to pick the stacks up. The fire grid is larger than it looks, so you can clip their boundaries relatively efficiently. Don't pick them up before 10 seconds on the allure count down or your stacks will drop just in time to blow the raid up. For the most part you should always have enough time to get a buff from the desecrates.
You can also use Deterrence to solo soak the Shadowfel.

My Weakauras for Doomfire weren't very inspiring or professional. Just threw them together when I got to the fight. But if you don't have any, here is what I used: http://pastebin.com/rxByv5iX

For phase 2, depending on your strat, you'll mostly just be bouncing between two locations whenever you're exploding the tethers. Spreading out for the beams will give you a wider berth to work with than a smaller circle. IE, if you stack up, it'll be harder to adjust beams and easier to clip yourself or kill someone. If you kill someone who is tethered, they will blow up and kill everyone inside their radius. It's better to just be geometrically aware of your line and everyone else around you! I believe RT has an archimonde module for this now.
Once again, disengage is great for saving movement time. Don't cut across a circle into another circle on the tether count down - take the fastest way out of the explosion radius. Swap for Careful Aim and Kill Shot on the doomlords [deathcallers] just like on Mannoroth - if they're alive for too long they'll kill your tank with the stacking debuff. Hunters are uniquely equipped for bursting down priority adds. Binding Shot can be helpful for keeping add spawns grouped for AoE. One of the Overfiends will spawn after the adds rather than with them, so you may have to cover an interrupt or call that the overfiend has spawned.

If you don't have a version of RT running in order to use the Archimonde module, here is one of the earlier weakauras for handling the beams: http://pastebin.com/H1zM5Qav

Finally, for phase 3, there's a few things to note. You should start the phase on the edge of the platform for conduits. Make sure you are not near other conduits while spawning conduits, because if they overlap even slightly they will explode. Similarly, that crack in the upper right corner of the platform is real. If you stand there you will fall through it and die.

Deterrence will save you through a dance - which is great both for when you're standing in the wrong spot AND for if your group is slow to kill infernals. You can hold one infernal out in the dance away from another live infernal in the safe location and avoid a wipe to them healing each other. Speaking of infernals, you have 15 seconds to kill them before they empower, hellfire and wipe the raid. You may wish to save cooldowns for the third and fourth set (the third is the first wave with four infernals, the fourth should be your last). Organizing DPS cooldowns will make or break your success with infernals. You'll also need good control over them - one good way to handle this is to assign three hunters to the three star adds in the back. Then these hunters will also handle one infernal each if they are not spawning and being handled by melee / tanks. One right, one left, one more central. Just keep in mind the infernals need to die in 15s or less - so if you move one to BFE it won't die. But you will! A good rule of thumb is to go into melee range of the infernal you're damaging the most, or have aggro on, so you can position it. Never 'cross the stream' of another infernal. Infernals healing suck.

Here is a weakaura for the Infernals Eternal Flame. It'll give you a countdown of 15 seconds so you know how much time you have until you're screwed: http://pastebin.com/d58GsRAt

One Star is easily handled by one hunter, so long as you remember to pool focus for its spawn and start with Aimed Shot for Careful Aim. If necessary you may have to slow it, or call for a GCD or two of help from someone else.

Here is an image of the phase 3 platform, showing one of many options for the four infernals being handled by specific people (not the only way, of course - this is largely dependant on where they spawn), and illustrating the crack in the top right.

The green lines on the ground also divide the room for the dance. The range "X" on the image above shows a good "safe spot" to stand in order to be in range of all the possible quadrants that will be filled by the dance.

You'll also want to avoid being 'knocked back' into other marks during mark if your raid is not handling this by forcing the locations of each. They'll explode in sequence, but most raids will prioritize putting melee in melee range rather than putting marks in explosion sequence. For our raid, we prioritized the front marks blowing up last instead.

Finally, here is our weakaura for the Phase 3 mark handling. This won't work for you out of the box - you'll have to go into the 'Actions' tab and change the custom text box to your raid groups names rather than ours: http://pastebin.com/p5tTSBwr

edit; Here is an additional video featuring the one doomfire strategy.